A Tale of Two Sisters

A Tale of Two Sisters: Perhaps the scariest film ever made and easily the most confusing.  This is part horror and part mind tease.  One scene in particular is easily the scariest moment in cinema since the tent scene in the Blair Witch Project.  A young lady is having a seizure.  She is on the floor.  Afterwards she is driving home with her husband and what she says is truly chilling. “I saw a little girl under the sink.”  The scene then shifts to her view as she lays on the ground looking at this horrifying ghostly image.  The tension that builds from there is remarkable as the next ten minutes are spent with the main character at the sink.  A good horror film is not bloody but is suspenseful.  This will give you a heart attack.

When watching this film a second time you begin to notice the house and how it is constantly changing.  Each room is beautiful.  As the film progresses the past and present look of the house keep changing depending where the state of mind of the lead character is in. The symbolism is everywhere but when I saw this film the first time I missed a lot of this as I was engrossed in the horror aspect.  I wrote about this in detail a few months back and how I believe Hollywood will not be able to remake this movie very well as they will undoubtedly have to dumb it down.  Anyways, this is head and shoulders above every other film made in 2005.

Memories of Murder

Memories of Murder: This finally came out on DVD but like many foreign films it took years to make it to the States.  This is an epic film and has already made many top ten lists for 2005.  This film manages to keep getting better and better until I really didn’t want the film to end.  The concept and the fact that this is a true story make it all the more compelling.  Basically the movie follows the investigation of South Korea's first recorded case of a serial killer.  Without advanced forensic technology the detectives must rely on old fashioned methods and even mailing evidence to the U.S. 

What an ending.  There are a few American crime films that are better as Hollywood typically excels at this particular genre, but in 2005 this is the best crime movie and the second best film of the year.

Crash

Not too preachy. That sums up this film nicely. Most people know this is a film about the constant challenge of living with multiple cultures in the United States. I was worried that this film would throw us soo many stereotypes and messages that it would weigh heavily against the story. This, luckily did not occur. Crash does delve deep into American racism, but it does so after building up a cast of incredible characters. The bottom line here is that every day at any time your life can be altered, even destroyed due to a wrong decision. Crash deals with devastating decisions grounded in misconceptions of race. Every angle is covered here and there are no "good guys or bad guys." We are the villains if we act before we think or understand. This should be a heavy Academy Awards film.

Batman Begins

 Christian Bale as Batman is really all you had to say to get me to see this film. He may be the best actor in Hollywood that no one knows. His dedication to his work in films like the Machinist(He went down to 125 pounds only to go back to 190 for Batman) is well know in Hollywood. What a cast:  Liam Neesan, Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Michael Kane, and Gary Oldman as a good guy!  As usual the academy only gave this film a few nominations (cinematography, sound etc.)  That’s to be expected with any sci-fi or super hero film.  What a great movie.  I’m not a super hero fan and could care less about those aspects.  I just want to see a good film and Batman Begins delivers.  It may not be quite as good as the two Spiderman films that recently came out but it is right up there.  Bring on the next movie in the series!  I can’t wait.

Howl’s Moving Castle

 This may not be the best Miyazaki film but it is still much better than almost everything out there.  If you have a kid or if you are a kid at heart then go to the video store and ask where their Miyazaki section is.  Normally all his films are together.  In Japan he holds many box office records, but here he is know by few.  Once again I was in awe for an hour and a half, not wanting the film to end.  It is a shame Miyazaki is so old because once he is gone the newest generation of filmgoers will miss out on what probably would have been more magical films.

Kingdom of Heaven

 If you saw Kingdom of Heaven in theatres you probably thought it was a movie with great action but was missing something. Here is the guy who made Gladiator and Black Hawk Down recently (not to mention Alien and Blade Runner).

This film could have been a classic but it felt empty. They got great acting (Edward Norton, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis(see Naked to see how good he can be), and that pretty boy metro guy from England.

Rent the director’s cut of this film. This is an hour longer.  It makes this one of the best films of the year.

Below is an exerpt from Moriarty:

 Ridley Scott took everything he’d done on BLACK HAWK DOWN and GLADIATOR and then stepped it up a notch, and in doing so, he made a better movie than his Oscar-winning smash hit. All the hard work that they did, along with their entire who’s who of talented technical collaborators, turned out to be for nothing, though, because someone looked at the running time and panicked. Someone lost their nerve, and they figured all that mattered was getting the battle scenes into the theater, that no one would care about anything else. And, yes, the battles here are masterful, some of the best ever committed to film. The reason they’re so great is because of the way they genuinely illustrate character and strategy and military accomplishment, rather than just mayhem and noise and fury and a nice software package, as with so many other big movies in the last few years. These are very specific battles, and the way the last hour of the film plays out, we see how Balian and Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) engage each other across the battlefield, and how Saladin begins to respect and even like this foe, admiring his military mind. Because Balian was an engineer, something we only learn in this version of the film, it makes perfect sense that he’d be able to figure out how to best defend the city and how to counteract the weaponry that Saladin brings to use against them. In both GLADIATOR and BLACK HAWK DOWN, Ridley Scott was learning how to shoot battle on a personal level and on a massive scale, and in this film, he puts it all together, everything he’s been building towards. There’s a sense in this film that you are in the middle of the battle, arrows racing by you on all sides, fire falling from the sky and smashing the city to pieces. It’s remarkable, and you can easily see where the big bucks were spent on the film.

Serenity

This was a good movie and a welcome relief after the Constant Gardner and The History of Violence. If you are a fan of Firefly this film is kind of the final chapter of the series. Since it bombed in theatres I doubt they will make new episodes which is what was the desired intention.
Serenity is what the newest Star Wars film should have been, a very good science fiction movie. This isn't a classic film or anything just a very good one and a fitting ending to the television series. This show should have been the next Star Trek but instead will fade away as a cult show that never had its chance. I am very surprised they pulled this off for only 45 million. The sets and special effects were better than movies with 4 times the budget. The final battle was one of the bigger sci-fi scenes ever filmed.

Jarhead

Welcome to the Suck. A good film basically about nothing. I guess you can call this the Seinfield of War movies. Jake Gyllenhaal was amazing. I don't always see him as Donnie Darko now. Once you make such a cult movie like that its hard to be taken seriously again.  He may win the award for Brokeback Mountain this year but Jarhead is much more interesting. He's the real deal as is Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard. A good cast for a good movie.
Is Jarhead the Academy Award powerhouse it was billed as? Nope. It’s good but not that good. (It also was not nominated)

The Jacket

This was a very cool film in the vain of Butterfly Effect. I love these kind of time traveling films. This movie is about a military veteran who goes on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his death, and is left with questions that could save his life and those he loves. It was not as depressing as the Butterfly Effect but probably as good. I would recommend seeing it.

Memoirs of the Geisha

It is too bad Speilberg left this production.  What was a good movie might have been great.  This is a good film with some very good acting.  While not as good as many hoped it might be, Geisha is still a fine film.  Gong Li gives a commanding performance.  After many years the most famous actress in the world is finally making a few Western films.  She's really that good and the language barrier will probably not be an issue for her.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

This is part of the “revenge series” of films, the third released recently overseas and probably everywhere except Maine.  I’m not sure why I liked this film better than Oldboy.  Oldboy is considered a modern classic by many and is being remade by Hollywood.  Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance just reminded me of watching a Tarantino film.  There is a mixture of comedy, action, and brutal violence.  SFMV forces a consideration of violence and its repercussions. Perhaps the greatest compliment is that there is no one film that it easily compares to; from style to story to impact, it is an original.  Park is considered a more “moral” director than Tarantino who many see as Exploitive.  Personally I want to see a good movie and this delivers.  There are no real bad guys here.  The hero in the first half becomes the villain towards the end of the film.

Oldboy

The sequel to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in name only.  Oldboy is up there with The Sixth Sense in best surprise endings ever.  This is one of the best films I saw this year, however most reviews I have read call this an instant classic.  I noticed this film initially as it was continually beating The Return of The King for movie of the year in 2004 and then took the top award at Cannes.  I read Ebert’s review and decided to check it out.  Ebert, as usual, summed the movie up nicely.  "It is also, really, the beginning of the movie, the point at which it stops being a mystery and becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. I will not reveal the several secrets that lie ahead for Oh, except to say that they come not as shabby plot devices, but as one turn after another of the screws of mental and physical anguish and poetic justice."

I’m not much of a student of what makes a great film.  This is not the masterpiece many say it is yet in a weak movie year Oldboy is still one of the best.
Want to see an octopus eaten alive on film?  This is your chance.

If you thought Resoirvoir Dogs or Kills Bill was graphic, stay away. 

Lords of Dogtown

Heath Ledger will win the academy award this year for Brokeback Mountain.  I haven’t seen the film and am sure it is good although Ang Lee made a mess out of the Hulk film he made.  Ledger is soo good in this film.  You can barely recognize him which is of course a good sign.  Why am I one of the few people recommending this film?  I have no idea.  I liked the journey the movie takes you on.  I liked the story and the acting.  Somehow when I was finished watching Lords of Dogtown it affected me.  I felt as if I was taken on a journey for two hours.  This is what a good movie does.

2046 (from my June review)

This finally came out on DVD and is the sequel of sorts to one of my favorite films of last year, In the Mood for Love. In years to come these two films will be looked on as classics. The cinematic, music and sets are among the best ever seen. The acting is superb and the writing is second to none.
Hollywood is finally taking notice. 2046 will be released in the States in August while much of the cast are now busy making American films. Entertainment Weekly ran an article this week on Zhang Ziyi, calling her one of the next big stars. I have yet to see her in a film and not been blown away. Most would recognize her from House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger.
This is a powerhouse film as far as star power, kind of like an Oceans 11 film. It took four years to make and many said it would never be done. If you have seen the movie Hero you have seen the cast of this film if you add Gong Li. They are much better here than in Hero.
The Chow Mowan character ranks up there with the best Bogart or Clark Gable. This is a complex character, one of the best I have ever seen. Tony Leung is mostly know as an action star in films like Hero. He really is a great actor and hopefully will do more great roles.
These films have a sense of style all their own. It is tough to describe but they take the normal brilliant Chinese cinematography and mix it with 1940's Hollywood then compose a soundtrack that is among the best ever made. Every shot in this film, every room and every actress has their own color. An example would be we see some roses near the camera. We see an actress at a bar in the distance with a red dress. The scene never leaves the view from the roses but we can see the colors of the actress being enhanced by the roses. I don't know if that makes sense but it comes out well in the movie.

That being said, this movie will bomb in Theatres. It is too slow, a love story, and not in English. I doubt you will see this except in a few art house cinemas. I loved it but the end was a bit dragged out. This is still a classic film and a redemption of sorts for Kar-Wai after making the Pulp Fictionesque Chunking Express.

Special Mention-The fun films

Stealth— Stealth really is not that bad of a film. Don't believe me?  Rent it if you dare. 

He doesn’t just shoot the bad guy, he grenades him into a barbed wire fence!

Complete with perhaps the cheesiest quote ever, I was like Yes! This movie rules!

To be honest this was a beautifully shot film with good actors and great location shooting in Thailand and onboard naval carriers.  Corny sometimes and sometimes great but if in the right mode this is definitely one of the funner films of 2005.

Doom----What a blast this film is! We saw this by ourselves (so we thought) and had a ball just yelling at the screen.  To be fair, the Rock manages to be quite terrible , the story is completely non original, and you don’t really care what happens.  This is compensated for by lots of action! The first person segment was amazing and worth the price of admission.

Bang Rajan----Another very fun movie.  This is actually a great film so don’t let the fact that I have this here with Doom and Stealth fool you.  I see this movie in a similar light to Conan.  It’s over the top at times with quite a few bad elements.  The action is first rate and the music is the best of the year. (Conan still has the best movie score ever written.)

If you can find it check it out.  I read a review of this calling it the “Southeast Asian Braveheart”  Here is more of what they said:

Look at the pictures I have here for this film.  These guys look tough!

The Black Robe---This is an amazing film.  I would highly recommend renting this.

Downfall---Another great film set in the final hours of Nazi Germany.